Sanine

While he was musing thus Ivanoff suddenly hailed him in a loud voice.

"Ah! it's you! Where are you going?" asked Yourii, shuddering.

"To say a mass for our departed friend," replied Ivanoff, with brutal

jocularity. "You had better come with us. What's the good of being

always alone?"

Feeling sad and dispirited, Yourii did not find Sanine and Ivanoff as

distasteful to him as usual.

"Very well, I will," he replied, but suddenly recollecting his

superiority, he thought to himself, "what have I really in common with

such fellows? Am I to drink their vodka, and talk commonplaces?"

He was on the point of turning back, but he felt such an utter horror

of solitude that he went along with them. Ivanoff and Sanine proffered

no remarks, and thus in silence they reached the former's lodging. It

was already quite dark. At the door, the figure of a man could be dimly

seen. He had a thick stick with a crooked handle.

"Oh! it's Uncle Peter Ilitsch!" exclaimed Ivanoff gleefully.

"Yes! that's he!" replied the figure, in a deep, resonant voice. Yourii

remembered that Ivanoff's uncle was an old, drunken church chorister.

He had a grey moustache like one of the soldiers at the time of

Nicholas the First, and his shabby black coat had a most unpleasant

smell.

"Boum! Boum!" His voice seemed to come out of a barrel, when Ivanoff

introduced him to Yourii, who awkwardly shook hands with him, hardly

knowing what to say to such a person. He recollected, however, that for

him all men should be equal, so he politely gave precedence to the old

singer as they went in.

Ivanoff's lodging was more like an old lumber-room than a place for

human habitation, being very dusty and untidy. But when his host had

lighted the lamp, Yourii perceived that the walls were covered with

engravings of pictures by Vasnetzoff, and that what had seemed rubbish

were books piled up in heaps. He still felt somewhat ill at ease, and,

to hide this, he began to examine the engravings attentively.

"Do you like Vasnetzoff?" asked Ivanoff as, without waiting for an

answer, he left the room to fetch a plate. Sanine told Peter Ilitsch

that Semenoff was dead. "God rest his soul!" droned the latter. "Ah!

well, it's all over for him now."

Yourii glanced wistfully at him, and felt a sudden sympathy for the old

man.

Ivanoff now brought in bread, salted cucumbers, and glasses, which he

placed on the table that was covered with a newspaper. Then, with a

swift, scarcely perceptible movement, he uncorked the bottle, not a

drop of its contents being spilt.